DIOGENES: In Search Of An Honest Politician!

DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this rainy day and read
posts from around the world.
The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it!
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but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!

Friday, August 18, 2017

‘Lay it on the line’: Judge in tea party case orders IRS to disclose employee names, reasons!

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to name the specific employees the agency blames for targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and said the government must prove it has ceased the targeting.
Judge Reggie B. Walton also said the IRS must explain the reasons for the delays for 38 groups that are part of a lawsuit in the District of Columbia, where they are still looking for a full accounting of their treatment.
Judge - Walton - Round - Discovery - Case Judge Walton approved another round of limited discovery in the case and laid out six questions that the IRS must answer, including the employees’ names, why the groups were targeted and how the IRS has tried to prevent a repeat.
At a hearing earlier this week, Judge Walton said it was time to get everything on the table.
Line - Attorneys - IRS - Tea - Party “Lay it on the line. Put it out there,” he told attorneys for the IRS, who are continuing to fight some tea party groups’ demands for full disclosure.
The targeting scandal burst open in May 2013 when the IRS admitted it had been pulling conservative-leaning groups’ nonprofit status applications out of the usual processing queue and subjecting them to extra scrutiny and extraordinary delays because of perceived political activity.
IRS - Executive - Lois - G - Lerner IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner initially said the problem was rogue employees at an Ohio office who botched the handling. But subsequent investigations revealed that IRS officials at the highest levels of Washington were aware of the delays and extra scrutiny.
Some applications are still awaiting approval, though the IRS as of late last month had agreed to a process for deciding on one of the key outstanding cases.

White House lawyer Cobb predicts quick end to Mueller probe

(Reuters) - The White House lawyer brought in to deal with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election said he believed the focus of the probe was "narrow" and the aspects related to President Donald Trump should be completed before the end of the year.

The lawyer, Ty Cobb, who joined the White House staff on July 31, made the comments in interviews with Reuters on Tuesday and Wednesday. He declined to provide specifics backing his outlook, which contradicts media reports that the scope of Mueller’s probe is expanding and the views of several outside experts that the investigation is likely to continue well into 2018.

"I'd like to see the president out from under this by Thanksgiving, but certainly by year end," Cobb said, adding that he would be "embarrassed" otherwise. "I think the relevant areas of inquiry by the special counsel are narrow."

The Answer to Charlottesville Is the Answer to Everything

Now that we’ve had a few days to cool down over the riot last Saturday in Charlottesville, we can look at the matter a little more dispassionately and discern a pattern working its way out.
The people who organized the so-called “Unite the Right” rally are members of a fringe group that, for better or worse, has come to be called the “alt-right.” Their core ideology appear­s to be that “white men,” that is, those of northwest European heritage, are the bearers of civilization and all that is noble, and are presently under assault by the Left.
When President Trump made his initial statement about the riot, he was widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike for his alleged failure to condemn, explicitly, “white supremacists.” As Orrin Hatch eloquently put it, his brother had not died fighting the Nazis in World War II in order to install them here.
If we backpedal just a few months, we will find numerous instances of this very same president, then candidate Trump, chiding the Democrats over and over again for their failure to utter two words: “Islamic terrorism.” And the Left’s reluctance to engage the jihadi threat is also entirely based on a racist core, in their case: the notion that the darker and browner one’s skin is, the more purely noble one is, and the more oppressed by “white privilege” one is.
In other words, there is no “alt-right” and no “alt left”; they are two horns on the same bull, and that bull is the phony, 19th-century pseudoscience which exalts one “race,” based upon a set of external characteristics, over another.
For well over 150 years now, we have been embroiled in this same ridiculous conversation, fueled by ideas that have been rendered obsolete by modern genetics, ideas which were in fact known to be incorrect from the moment they were first formulated.
If we go back to the founding of the republic, we encounter the Declaration of Independence, which asserts boldly that “all men are created equal” and that they are all endowed “by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” From this we can discern two fundamental truths: (1) the belief in a Creator Who made us all in His image (so that the color of one’s hair, eyes, and skin plays no role in anything; how could it?); and (2) that the Founding Fathers, including the slave-holders among them, in particular Thomas Jefferson, who authored the document, did NOT own human beings as chattel property because they believed them to be “inferior” to other human beings; that notion came later.
The fact is that the racism of both the unhinged “alt-right” and of the equally unhinged “alt-left” is rooted in a fundamentally atheistic idea, the notion that human life is NOT the result of Divine action on a cosmos which He created, but is instead the product of inchoate, impersonal, inanimate forces -- call it “natural selection,” “evolution” or whatever you like -- and that therefore a human being is no different and has no more “rights” than a pig, a goat, or cow.
This fundamental atheism, as I’ve already pointed out, flies in the face of the fundamental philosophy that animated the civil society out of which our republic arose. It also underlies all of the wedge issues that exist between conservatives and Leftists in this country.
Take, for instance, the issue of sexuality, which the Left has largely succeeded in converting to be about “gender.” As I have argued many times elsewhere, sex is not a dirty word; it is a biological imperative; one is born either male or female. The Left, however, does not want to believe in a biological imperative put in place at the beginning by the Creator, and so they have adopted the term “gender.” This in fact refers to classification categories in the grammar of human languages, which may have something to do with sex -- as, e.g., in Hebrew -- or may not, as in certain other languages in which the gender categories are “animate” and “inanimate” (cf. e.g. the Ojibwa language).
The advantage of making the conversation about “gender” is that gender is mutable, while sex is not. For instance, the common German word for “girl,” mädchen, is of neuter gender, as opposed to Frau, “woman,” which is feminine.
Or take “same sex marriage,” an oxymoron which, well within my living memory, would have been impossible to utter only a few decades ago, when “marriage” was defined as “the legal union of man and woman as husband and wife” (American Heritage Dictionary, 1969). Once we’ve redefined marriage, we can declare it a civil, not a sacred, institution. Then we can declare that any possible coupling can be blessed with the civil privileges that were always accorded actual marriage as a stable institution to provide the best environment for child-rearing and companionship between the sexes.
Or take abortion as one more such issue. The Left has come down four-square behind the notion that abortion should be legal, indeed, paid for by the state, for a whole host of eugenic purposes to prevent the coming into being of umlebenswertes Leben and its concomitant nutzlose Fresser (a term so contemptuous that it’s not possible to render it completely into English), whose “quality of life” we, in august authority, judge to be so poor that it ought to be denied.
And this, of course, automatically leads to euthanasia, as again other people deem to judge the “quality of life” for the aged and infirm for them.
The only path back from the brink, the only way that we can, in fact, unite the country and “make America great again,” is to be trying to reconstruct the civil society based in the timeless truth of Biblical morality.
Otherwise, we are doomed to many more Charlottesvilles, as the Brownshirts battle the Red Guards.

That's what Juanita Broaddrick wants to know.
Speaking exclusively to The American Mirror, Broaddrick denounced the lack of efforts to uproot a monument to Bill Clinton in South Dakota, the man she says raped her in a Little Rock, Arkansas hotel room in 1978.
"I would like to 'personally' use a sledgehammer on it, with the help of Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones," Broaddrick says.

Anger as Irish must pass English-speaking test to become Canadian!

August 16, 201704:30 AM

Candian immigration requires English-proficiency tests all round if you wish to gain Canadian permanent residency. ISTOCK

Canadian immigration law requires Irish people to undergo an English proficiency test to gain permanent residency - they aren't happy about it

Young Irish immigrants in Canada have expressed their annoyance at being forced to undertake an English-proficiency test, despite English being their first language, when applying for Canadian permanent resident status. Some immigration lawyers are also calling on the Canadian federal government to set aside the requirement to prove English-speaking proficiency when the applicant for permanent residency is a national of a country where English is one of the official languages.

Ireland’s two official languages are Irish and English and, while not every Irish person speaks Irish, the nearly everyone speaks English as their first language. This is not enough to exempt Irish citizens, however, from having to take the online (Canadian) English test when applying for Canadian permanent residency status, a crucial step on the road to citizenship.

Mamann explained that prior to 2013, applicants could simply prove their proficiency through an interview with an immigration officer, but that the new CAN$265 ($208) written test is completely online and unavoidable.

"It makes us look a little bit too bureaucratic," he said. "Obviously we want to have an objective standard but there has to be some allowance for common sense.

"We're asking people who basically invented the English language to prove they speak English."

Even English citizens required to prove they can speak English to gain Canadian permanent residency

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All nationalities are required to take the Canadian English-proficiency test, regardless of their first language.

And he wasn’t joking. In his own experience, he’s had to explain to applicants from England, including a university professor, that they were going to have to take the test to prove they could speak English.

"I sat there with a professor of English in the UK at a reputable university and I'm explaining to him I need him to undertake an English language test. it just seems kind of silly,” he told CBC.

A spokesperson for Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), Carl Beauchamp, told Canada's national TV station in an email: "To be consistent and transparent, IRCC requires all applicants to provide proof of language proficiency through an objective test.

"Mandatory language proficiency tests for applicants to economic immigration programs have been in place for many years ... With a standard language proficiency test, all applicants are evaluated against the same standards, no matter their language of origin, nationality or ethnicity."

Irish immigrants unhappy at Canadian English-proficiency test

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have had a good time in Ireland but the Candian federal government are being criticized by Irish immigrants because of an English-proficiency test.

CBC also spoke to some Irish immigrants in Canada who had previously taken the test. They indicated that they thought it was an unfair requirement and an unnecessary expense when they come from an English-speaking country.

"It just seems so unnecessary," Sinéad Breen told CBC.

"I'm a member of a Facebook group called Irish and Applying for Canadian PR, and it's a question that comes up a lot.”

"I think if you're from an English-speaking country and it's your first language, even your high school equivalent would be enough to put you through."

English-proficiency test in the USA

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Will Trump bring in an English proficiency test for legal immigration to the US?

This issue with the Canadian immigration system follows the recent announcement from President Trump of his support for the “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act” (RAISE) Act, proposed by two Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia.

While this will certainly affect Irish immigrants who do not earn as much as the $77,900 threshold proposed by the Bill, or those who do not have a Masters degree specifically in the areas of science, technology, engineering or mathematics. having fluent English will at least award them 12 of the 30 points needed to pass this merit-based system.

While an ideal candidate should have won an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize in the past ten years, which would award them a massive 15 or 25 of the 30 points needed, respectively, it appears that the most realistic way to achieve the golden ticket number 30 is to be between the ages of 26 and 30, with a doctorate, high English proficiency, and a job offer with a high salary. Any position earning below $77,900 would give you zero points.

While an English proficiency test is needed to apply to be a permanent resident in Canada, it is not needed to apply for a work permit. Questions on the test are created by the IRCC, although it is administered by a subsidiary of the University of British Columbia called Paragon Testing Enterprises. It covers listening, reading, writing and speaking skills, and takes about three hours to complete online.

Do you think Irish people should have to take an English proficiency test while applying for permanent residency or a green card in Canada or anywhere else in the world? Should fluent English always be a requirement? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, below.

ObamaCare, Not Trump, Is Causing ObamaCare's Massive Rate Hikes!

Health Care: In Iowa, the state's sole remaining insurer announced on Thursday that it wants to boost ObamaCare premiums by 57%. This isn't exactly the vibrant, competitive, low-cost market that Democrats promised. But it is the inevitable outcome of ObamaCare's government-knows-best approach to health care.
Earlier this year, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield announced that they were pulling out of Iowa's ObamaCare exchange, leaving only Medica, which was also threatening to leave. Not surprisingly, Medica has used its newfound monopoly status to push for increasingly higher rates, while trying to pin the blame President Trump for the increases.
The media, of course, are happy to buy into it that claim. Anything to bash Trump.
But Iowans shouldn't. Nor should anyone else in the country who heads to the exchanges later this year only to find — for the third year in a row — there are fewer choices and record-breaking premium hikes.
The seeds of today's double-digit premium increases and collapsing competition were planted long before Trump took the oath of office. In fact, they were embedded right there in the law President Obama signed in 2010.

CNN’s Dog-Whistling Is Working According To Plan

It should surprise no one that we now have leftwing Democrat officials joining the Kathy Griffins and Snoop Doggs of the world in overtly calling for the president’s assassination. After all, this is exactly what the fake news media, led by the open seditionists at CNN, have been dog-whistling to readers and viewers since last November. When you have a coordinated effort by the national Democrat Party and 95% of the national news media to de-humanize a sitting president in the eyes of the public for the express purpose of bringing down his presidency, that is a virtue-signal that killing him is ok. After all, if President Trump is no different than Hitler – an assertion we see made on CNN or MSNBC every day of the week – well, then, who wouldn’t kill Hitler?
Make no mistake about it, that is the goal of this coordinated effort by the Democrats and their fake media agents. Senator Nadal proves the campaign is working.
And speaking of the nitwits at CNN… – Just when you thought CNN could not become any more absurd, fake news host Wolf Blitzer suggested on live national (sort of) television on Thursday that the Muslim terrorist who killed 13 in Barcelona by driving his van down a tourist-filled street might be “a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.” No really, he really said that – you just can’t make this stuff up.
Seriously, do these people at CNN just read stuff off their teleprompter and never absorb any of what they actually say? How many times in the past two years has the world borne witness to incidents in which many innocent people have been killed by Muslim terrorists driving a van, a heavy truck or a passenger car into a crowd of tourists?

Colin Kaepernick: History's Hero?

The National Football League's preseason is underway, and national anthem-hating quarterback Colin Kaepernick still doesn't have an NFL job. One can easily identify the liberal journalists by their anguish over this so-called injustice. You can also identify them by their dishonest arguments.

Washington Post sports columnist Jerry Brewer pulled out a very large straw man on Aug. 17 in a column headlined "Days of Docile Black Athlete Have Ended. Get Used to It." He doubled down in the text, saying: "Sorry for the inconvenience, sports fans, but the days of the docile black athlete are over. This isn't a time to stick to sports. This isn't a time to be afraid because Kaepernick has been blackballed." To argue that Kaepernick's critics want "docile blacks" is character assassination.
Then, Brewer added that the national anthem lasts about two minutes, as does an interview after the game about that anti-American kneeling stunt. He spewed: "If you think that's too much of a distraction from sports -- the ultimate distraction -- you're living an awfully petty life. I'm sorry you didn't get to put extra sprinkles on your ice cream, but there are more important matters."
Brewer surely knows that Kaepernick's antics didn't cause two minutes of liberal concern or conservative outrage. We've had an entire summer of ESPN and other liberal sports pundits like Brewer demanding that Kaepernick somehow has an inalienable right to a job in the NFL after his antics.
Most of these liberals impose their own righteousness about America's "systematic racism" without acknowledging that Kaepernick went beyond this quiet pre-game stance. They ignore that he wore socks in training camp featuring pigs with police hats on them. They ignore that he wore a T-shirt with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro on it as he supposedly advocated for freedom of speech.
When challenged by Cuban exile Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald about the T-shirt, Kaepernick proclaimed that communist Cuba was better than America. He said, "One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we're fully capable of doing that."
Salguero called that out as false, as phony as the Castros winning 100 percent of the vote. When he told the quarterback that Castro's regime broke up families (including his own) as they sought to escape, Kaepernick attacked America again. "We do break up families here," he said. "That's what mass incarceration is. That was the foundation of slavery, so our country has been based on that as well as the genocide of Native Americans."
It's not a matter of "extra sprinkles on our ice cream" to smear the police as porcine, racist killers and smear America as founded not on liberty and justice but on slavery and genocide.
But Brewer, that professor of logic, thinks that Kaepernick's complete evisceration of America is somehow what makes this country ... great? He said: "But if America is still America -- beautiful despite some ugly features, slow to evolve but persistent, a compassionate democracy -- history will judge Kaepernick ultimately not as a rogue and defiant objector, but a man ahead of this time who helped spur an important athlete revolution."
What liberal journalists are demanding here is that every famous person in front of a microphone exploit that platform to call for a leftist revolution. Athletes, actors, musicians, reality TV stars and everyone else should always be shilling against the horrid country that America was -- and presently is under the Republicans. "History" (always equated with liberalism) will grade them as heroes ahead of their time.

Democrats have lost the "South" & possibly the entire country!

I have accurately predicted the Trump POTUS victory right from the start of the recent POTUS campaign. I have been predicting lately that the Democrat Party will suffer the loss of between 8-10 Senate seats & 12-20 House seats in the upcoming "Mid-Term" elections in 2018. I now feel the Democrat Party (with Media help) losses will increase, as I feel the Democrats have lost the entire group of "Southern" states, totally, and possibly the entire country, or close to it. In the state of Virginia, the Democrats will massively lose both the Governorship and the Senate seat held by Tim Kaine, the 2016 VP Candidate.

The reason is quite simple and clear. The Democrat Party campaign to erase the history, heritage and culture of these United States of America, both the good and bad practices throughout out history is offensive to the overwhelming majority of the American people.
The millions of Southerners, both Democrats & Republicans who come from and live in the South and have family ties that reach back to the Civil War, etc. are railing against the willful destruction not only of monuments, history and culture, but the demeaning of the loved ones that preceded them and fought on the deadly battlefields of the Civil War..
I make one simple statement here as a good student of American history....the Civil War was not simply about slavery and preserving the "Union", it was complicated by many factors North & South. There was both good and bad on both sides. Yet the overwhelming numbers of the fighting forces of the Confederacy was shouldered by average young soldiers that were non-slave holders, fighting to protect their property, farms, families, culture and future.
When this horrible war was ended the Lincoln words of "malice towards none" spoke volumes for the healing process which was to take a long road...and, may be still a work in progress. Good or bad, one must know where he or she came from to set a path of where they are going into the future. This Democrat "evil" scheme to change the history books, including many of our founding fathers, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, etc. will fail, and it will fail, taking the current Democrat Party with it. I believe little polling information these days....but, it appears that Americans want the badge of our history as it is and shall remain, for better or worse.

Transgender diversity weakens Canadian military

This week's question: Should transgender people be allowed to serve in the Canadian military?

On Friday former premier Christy Clark resigned as leader of the B.C. Liberal Party and Kelowna MLA. Her downfall at the polls and subsequent departure from politics is largely a result of her abandoning long articulated principles.
Many on the Left relished demonizing her and would never have voted for her. Yet, over the course of the 18 months preceding the May election Clark began pandering to the Left.
Just before Vancouver’s annual Pride Parade in 2016 Clark suddenly abandoned the government’s principled position, which refused to provide special protections to transgender people in the B.C. Human Rights Code. The decision left many on the right wondering if Clark had ever been the principled leader she had so often touted. We learned the complete answer during the post-election throne speech — Christy Clark has no principles.
It seems, neither does the Canadian military unless one considers 'virtue signaling' a principle, which it is not.
Almost instantly following President Trump’s courageous and principled decision to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, the Canadian Armed Forces tweeted from its official account: "We welcome Cdns of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Join us!" accompanied by a photo of flute playing forces and the hashtag #DiversityIsOurStrength.
This tweet demonstrates the perilous impact of allowing social justice ideology to infect the Canadian military. How does diversity defeat radical Islam? It doesn’t. It empowers radical Islam and weakens resolve here at home.
Don’t take my word for it. Camille Paglia, the fiery feminist, university professor, renowned author and fearless advocate of gender equality said in a 2014 interview with the Feminist Times “transgenderism has taken off like a freight train ... there has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well.” This is an ominous prediction, yet it partially explains why the West seems unable to mount any defence against those seeking to destroy our society.
I do concede Garth’s point that gender fluidity is not a new phenomenon. However, as Paglia warns “transgender phenomena multiply and spread in 'late' phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline.”
Canada must resist the pressure to transition our battle-ready forces into social justice warriors.

A handful of self-described supporters of President Donald Trump converged on Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood Wednesday to call for the removal of a statue of Russian Communist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin that has stood in the neighborhood for 22 years.
Protesters Wednesday wore Make America Great Again hats and held signs that said “Lenin = Hitler,” “100 Million Dead” and “Alt-Left Hate,” and they chanted slogans such as “Shame on Seattle,” “Tear hate down,” and “Genocide is not a joke” at passing cars and people grabbing lunch in the arty, tech-heavy neighborhood. Fremont is home to offices of such tech companies as Google, Adobe, Tableau, Outreach and Pixvana.
The protest comes in response to violence in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend during a rally around a statue there of Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee, and the subsequent removal of Confederate statues in other cities.
One protester climbed atop the statue as others live-streamed their sometimes heated debates with anyone willing to engage with them on the walk past the 16-foot tall bronze sculpture in the center of the neighborhood.
Jack Posobieck, a well-known internet activist and political advocate for Citizens for Trump, stood below the statue wearing a red MAGA T-shirt. He said he flew into Seattle from Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning specifically to protest Lenin

The Democrats Wanted Charlottesville!

The riots were not about a statue and it was not about the alt-right. Antifa (an umbrella term for different nominally “anti-fascist” groups) has been itching for a real fight for a long time. It was only fun attacking Trump supporters for so long (as they did in Seattle over the weekend), and their exposure in the press has been diminishing. What’s the point of rioting if you can’t get your group on CNN? Sure, you can’t let your identity be known because of potential criminal charges but the mask takes care of that. Then, you can tell your friends for years that you were there that day battling white oppression and fascism. You were Antifa! You were Black Lives Matter!
Trump was right; while the racism of white supremacists is a scourge on the morality of man, Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) are no better; they are merely acceptable progressive racism. Americans are being sold a lie. Charlottesville was a deliberate plan by the left to provoke a confrontation of such scale that all of America would notice and opinion would again break their way. It’s wrong, yes, but since progressives are on the side of all that is right and just, no depravity or moral turpitude is unacceptable in attaining their goals, which are simple -- universal liberal governance.
Why do you think Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, held back the many hundreds of State Police troopers and National Guardsmen that were on site? Why do you think Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer, another Democrat, ordered the more than 300 police officers on hand to stand down?